How to Make Money With Affiliate Marketing – A 7 Minute Guide

However, not every blogger is able to generate a good income from affiliate commissions.

I tell you more, with more than 1 billion websites out there (source “internet live stats“), many will not even be able to generate a single sale.

But let’s look at the glass half full.

Indeed, many bloggers have taken affiliate marketing a step further and have devoted their entire professional lives to working online.

I’m sure it’s the dream of many of you.

But what turn a good affiliate into a great affiliate?

In truth there is no easy answer, as the range of potential products and services that can be promoted through affiliate marketing means that there has been an equally diverse range of practices and methods used to exploit it.

If you’re completely in the dark about this whole affiliate marketing though let me fill you in.

Here are some points you need to consider when choosing the path of making money online with affiliate marketing (this post contains circa 1500 words and takes around 7 minutes to read).

What is Affiliate Marketing and How It Works?

It’s a relatively modern form of marketing that has its roots in the early nineties, when companies would hire members of the general public to direct people to their stores.

The reasoning is that people are more likely to trust ‘one of their own’ than a company drone.

The affiliate marketing of today is essentially the same practice, only online.

Now, when you register to affiliate programs, you will get a unique affiliate link, that you are going to use when promoting that specific product.

This is a tracking URL, which companies (or affiliate networks) use to record if the sale was generated by your referral.

Every affiliate program you are going to register to, has its own terms of service like, for example, the cookie period.

If this time is set to 30 days, this means that if your visitor use your affiliate link to check a product web page, but decide to buy it within the next 30 days period, then you will still receive the affiliate commission.

Here are some important affiliate marketing terms you should read about.

Affiliates: people (webmasters, bloggers) who will use affiliate programs in order to generate an income.

Affiliate Link: the unique tracking link you will receive when signing up for an affiliate program.

Commission: it’s the amount of money you are going to get for each sale of the specific product or service you promote.

2 Tier Affiliate Marketing: another source of income for you. Basically, if you recommend registering to an affiliate program and some of your readers will do, you will get a percentage of the commissions this user is going to generate (for a certain amount of time – generally one year). Some examples? SeedingUp, ValuedVoice.

The above mentioned are just the basic terms you need to know to start your journey as affiliate marketing.

Soon, you will learn about coupons code, URL shortener, landing pages, and so on.

Choose the Right Partners

Obviously if your blog adheres to a specific niche, you’ll want to use partners whose products reflect that market.

For example, if you’re running a blog that deals with health and fitness you should be looking for affiliates that deal with products such as health supplements and gym equipment and services such as personal training.

If your blog is less focused of course you’ll have potential options, but it’s always best to have a clear, defined focus.

Also, try not to focus on affiliates that only sell small ticket (inexpensive) items and services.

And when you receive an email in your inbox, announcing that you made a sale, you can party!

Find a Balance

As a blogger, affiliate marketing can potentially create an enormous amount of revenue for you and whomever it is you’re partnering with, but if you’re too heavy handed with it, your blog could lose its credibility.

As your blog loses credibility it will lose viewers and that will send it spiraling down the search engine results ranking, leading your partners feeling like they’ve backed a lame horse.

Be sure to keep your blog stocked with content that isn’t affiliate marketing based or people will soon see through you and you’ll not only lose your blog but also any potential revenue you could earn through it.

If your content is not worth reading then nobody will read it, it really is that simple.

Research Affiliate Companies

Unfortunately as an affiliate, there’s very little chance you’ll be going it alone.

If you really want to make a decent amount of revenue you’ll need to use an affiliate program.

The company who run the program will be the ones paying you so make sure that you do as much research as possible into the companies rates in comparison to their competitors and ask around to see if the company you’re considering have a good track record with their users.

Most affiliate programs will operate on a ‘pay per click’ or ‘pay per sale’ basis.

With PPC, you’ll get a commission for every person who visits your site and is referred to your affiliate partners site through your links and with PPS you’ll only get your commission if the visitor eventually ends up purchasing an item or service from your partner’s site.

Obviously you’ll generally gain more commission from a PPS system, but the commission will be far more infrequent.

Whether you decide you prefer PPC or PPS depends very much on your own personal preferences but make sure that the company you choose to work for uses the payment arrangement that you’re most comfortable with.

Produce HIGH-QUALITY Content

Do you know your audience?

Well, be sure to promote just those specific products or services which are relevant to your users and strive to create content that solves their problems or needs.

The second tool I suggest you is WP Product Review plugin, which allows you to create nice graphics with different options for your reviews (with pros and cons of the product or the ability to easily insert affiliate links) and offers you a fast and easy way to add different interesting functionalities to your blog content.

Conclusion

I hope this small guide to affiliate marketing is going to help you to get started.

There are many possibilities to earn money on the web. Most of them have in common that you need high quality content.

To generate truly high class journalistic content an education is the best way. Open School of Journalism offers a distance education program in journalism with many electives including online journalism, content marketing etc.

About Erik Emanuelli

Comments

Another great post. For full time bloggers, a large part of the earning comes from affiliate marketing. It is very important that you choose to market the right product according to your niche, as you have mentioned in the post. Marketing a wrong product will not generate any revenue as it will not cater to the needs of your target audience.

You might want to change the typo in the title Erik, I suppose ‘With’ is mistakenly written as ‘Wih’ 🙂

These are some great tips on Affiliate Marketing. The best way to promote a product is to write an honest review. You would also need a big subscriber list. Most of the people now a days don’t open all their emails. So, you’ll have a low open rate. Sending newsletters is the best way of affiliate marketing because you’re targeting specific audience and you have a higher chance of selling.

I think affiliate revenue should be part of most bloggers income. I like it because it requires less traffic than advertising.
Good point about balance.I think many bloggers start to think about monetization too late.
Thank you for the MBP Ninja recommendation. I am looking into it.

I am huge on churning out the big, in-depth posts that really gain the trust of your readers. Once you have that trust, you’re golden on the affiliate side of things. Excellent points Erik, because if you create helpful content, and in-depth stuff at that, and if you give it away for free, you’ll generate affiliate sales or product sales, no problems.

I wish I had this guide a couple of years ago when I was trying my hand on affiliate marketing. I was successful in using PPC and generating leads, but you know what? I wasn’t getting a lot of sales! But I didn’t have a strong, basic foundation on affiliate marketing and I believe this post would’ve directing me in the right direction. Now I know I’m heading in the right direction. The only thing that sucked is that it took me a couple of years to realize this LOL…

Great affiliate marketing tips Erik Sir.
According to me, choosing right partner and produce high quality article is the main point.
But sometimes affiliate sale depends on trust value. If we build trust in our readers. We can make affiliate sale easily.
BTW thanks for your tips.
Hope you have a great weekend. 🙂

Hi Erik,
Again a useful post by you for bloggers to help newbies to make money from blogging.
Affiliate marketing is the best way to make money online, one can make huge income from affiliate commissions. Sky is the limit.

Simply nice post. Affiliate marketing is one of the finest ways to earn money online through your blog but doing it right way can only work. Just adding few affiliate links in your posts don’t work mostly.

Hosting companies pay well. I am using CJ and planning to start using ShareAsale too.

My experience with Hostgator was not good. They cancelled my commission when I made few sales on cyber Monday deals.

That is an eminent post with loads of tips. I see the “produce brilliant substance” in all tops – that is imperative.

For associate promoting to work, it is fundamental that we first form the trust. It is not around one off deals and commissions. It is around a long haul relationship.

In the event that we can demonstrate to individuals that we are being certified (in our proposals) and accommodating (in the surveys and excercises), it is anything but difficult to procure that trust.

When the trust is manufactured it won’t be tricky to make those deals 🙂

Hi Erik,
Affiliate Marketing is really awesome and one of the best way to make money online. I also make some money per month from Amazon Affiliate and MyThemeShop affiliate. I’m going to make money money with MyThemeShop and it’s really awesome.

Erik, excellent stuff releaved again. First foremost thing is have your audience , with out them n doing something is useless. We should have our loyalty to the audience , our readers or if we do videos, we should precisely know our viewers or our listeners, and create something fantastic stuff, that talks about different ascepts of a well-defined topic and that, gives you a lots of flexibility so you can talk about different kinds of products on an affiliate basis. The next important thing is the content creation magic which always serves as key profitable to affiliate marketing. If you deliver good content means that you’re giving value to your reader.

You’ve well statement your experiments on various products, you’re good marketer from your post I can see that you gives words and understanding how you use it, telling about choose right partners, find balance , care about, right tools that helps better understand about affiliates products as well.

Affiliate marketing is based on giving helpful and honest reviews of relevant products and services to your audience.
Of course, they are more likely to buy from people they trust, so building authority is another step toward affiliate marketing success.

Hi Erik,
I got to your website from some source,but in the very first visit to your blog,I was totally amazed with your awesomeness! of the post,Your catchy titles really makes me of course others too click on it,The Post seems really great,you’ve explained everything from the scratch and that’s a cool stuff! 🙂 😉
This article helped me so much in affiliate marketing
Thanks for the share
Regards
Prajwal

Earning money from affiliate marketing very hard for me, I started my affiliate program through ShareASale last 2 months back, till now I didn’t make any sale.

Sometimes I feel I am dumb at affiliate marketing, after reading this article, I got a little hope of earning money from affiliate, let us hope for the best, thank you very much for sharing this information.

In the very first visit to your blog,I was totally amazed with your awesomeness! of the post,Your catchy titles really makes me of course others too click on it,The Post seems really great,you’ve explained everything from the scratch and that’s a cool stuff!

Hey Erik
Affiliate marketing is the most profitable method to earn money online but It also bit difficult if we will not promote the product correctly. Right?
As I have seen in the above article that You have exlain a little bit about HostGator affiliate program. I have a question that when HostGator pays to their affiliates?

“Commissions are verified at the end of each month, 2 months after the sale was sent. Payments are then sent within the first week of the next month. The registered account must also meet our requirements per our TOS and be currently active and paid up to date at the time of payout, and there is a $100 minimum balance to reach before you are paid. If you have not accumulated $100 in commissions, any unpaid commissions would be held until you accumulated $100, at which time it will be paid out.”

Hi Erik,
I have started a affiliate marketing few days before but I am not able to get more sales from my blog. Now today I got a quick guide regarding affiliate marketing and Now I will use the Plugin in my blog especially WP Product Review.
Thank you for adding the valuable information and sharing the Tips of affiliate Marketing.. 🙂

You can start affiliate marketing right away, even after just one post.
Be sure to respect the user experience, add only relevant affiliate links and not overdo.
You may want to check this guide for further information:http://nopassiveincome.com/how-to-start-a-blog/

This is the true which is presented in the blog regarding the number of websites: 1217253303 and the way one could earn money through Hostgator is also great. Blog post was really superb and inspiring one. hats off to you.

Hello Erik,
I use a few affiliate programs. But i’m novice at this one. Your advices are really helpful. Now i can go on next level. I will follow up your articles. Thank you so much for your tips!
Greetings